Continental Philosophies of the Social Sciences David Teira
Continental philosophies of the social sciences David Teira 1. Introduction In my view, there is no such thing as a continental philosophy of the social sciences. There is, at least, no consensual definition of what is precisely continental in any philosophical approach. 1 Besides, there are many approaches in the philosophy of the social sciences that are often qualified as continental , but there is no obvious connection between them. The most systematic attempt so far to find one is Yvonne Sherratt’s (2006) monograph, where continental approaches would be appraised as different branches of the Humanist tradition. According to Sherratt, philosophers in this tradition draw on the ideas and arguments of the ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, since they understand philosophy as an accumulative endeavor, where the past is a continuous source of wisdom. Unlike empiricist philosophers in the analytic tradition, humanists see the world as an intrinsically purpose-laden, ethically, aesthetically, and spiritually valuable entity . However, once you adopt such a broad definition in order to encompass such different thinkers as Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger or Foucault, it seems difficult not to see humanistic traits in analytic philosophers as well. Moreover, when it comes to the philosophical study of actual social sciences, it is not clear whether adopting a humanistic stance makes, as such, any difference in the analysis: as we will see below, the arguments of the continental philosophers discussed here do not presuppose a particular commitment with, e.g., ideas from classical Antiquity. Certain Greeks named those who did not speak their language Barbarians , but it was never clear who counted as a proper speaker of Greek.
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